Welcome, my old friend NED!

Maybe someday scanxiety will stop having such a hold on me. It persisted through the long time (almost a week) that it took for Hopkins to post the results of all the tests Robert had done last week. The reports I read last night confirmed what Dr. Lipson found at our visit last Tuesday – no evidence of disease. Whew!

melanoma

My so-called writing life

I think I was born an editor, not a writer. In fact, for most of my life writing has not come easily for me. Throughout my life before I retired from BNA, I was able to do it successfully from time to time – occasional good research papers during college come to mind, along with one or two well-done market research reports and product proposals near the end of my employment. But being a freelancer with a heavy writing project load was difficult. And, until recently blogging was particularly difficult.

Scanxiety – bigtime!

For a while it seemed as though I might escape the dreadful scanxiety this time. But as we approach Robert’s appointment at Johns Hopkins on Tuesday, it’s making up for lost time ... I’m sleeping poorly, awake during the night, waking up hard (not refreshed) in the morning after strange dreams.

melanoma

Advice for the newly diagnosed with medical family members

This morning a newly diagnosed melanoma patient posted a query on the Melanoma Research Foundations’ Melanoma Patients Information Page seeking advice on how to deal with all the new information she was learning about melanoma – sentinel nodes, wide local excision, micrometastases, Stage 3, 5-year prognosis, complete lymph node dissection, lymphedema. Her story was full of information she got from her brother, an oncologist but not a melanoma specialist, and her father, an orthopedic surgeon.

Her statement that all the statistics meant nothing to her at this point prompted me to reply. I’m cross-posting my response to her here. If you follow MPIP you can skip the rest.

melanoma

My escape from the center of the universe

One of the hardest life-lessons I’ve learned is that it’s not always “all about me.”

I recently listened to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College and heard this theme addressed in a most cogent way. It made me go back and think about my own departure from that time of my life in which I was the center of the universe. I wish I had heard Wallace’s speech around the time I graduated from college – if I had been receptive, or even able to understand his concepts, I might have had an easier time earlier in my life.

self-awareness

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